Managing and monitoring ESXi devices

About VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi (also known as VMware vSphere Hypervisor) is a purpose-built hypervisor operating system that runs on bare metal and incorporates VMware’s virtualization technologies. ESXi can be configured to manage virtual machines that run within the ESXi core and that are monitored by it. Virtual machines running on an ESXi server will be allocated a share of the resources of the host system. Also see A note on Subscription.

The ESXi hypervisor operating system does not permit application installation per se, making installation of the Datto RMM Agent impossible. Servers running ESXi must therefore be managed as network devices, facilitating the use of Network Nodes for device discovery, monitoring and management.

Please note that ESXi 6.5 and later disable CIM access by default, therefore, the Web Portal will report CIM authentication errors in the ESXi device summary. To solve this:

Enable the SSH service on the ESXi device.

Connect to the ESXi device via SSH (for example, using Putty).

Perform the following commands:

esxcli system wbem set --enable true
/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start

Performing these commands permits the “sfcbd-watchdog” service to start with WBEM (another term for CIM) enabled, permitting the device to broadcast CIM data to the Network Node. Only by performing these steps will your ESXi hypervisor report CPU Socket and RAM information correctly.

These steps also permit ESXi servers to access information pertaining to device serial codes which may not be audited otherwise.

The Network Node device performing ESXi monitoring must run on Windows operating system and have Microsoft .NET Framework version 4.7 or higher.

The Network Node device performing ESXi monitoring can run on a guest machine on the ESXi host. Please note that the downside of monitoring from a guest is that all monitoring stops when the host goes down.

ESXi monitoring is supported across subnets, so the Network Node device does not have to be on the same subnet as the ESXi device but it must be on the same network to be reachable.

"Subscription" is an industry-standard term used to refer to the maximum potential capacity occupation of all virtual machines within an ESXi host.

VMs have a maximum size they can expand to but, by default, they are provisioned to only occupy the storage that they are actively using on the host. For example, a VM that has a maximum size of 10GB but is only using 2GB will be 2GB in size.

A potential situation can occur where a host's data becomes "oversubscribed" (that is, the host's Subscription shows more than 100%) because the sum of occupied space with all VMs at capacity would exceed the host's storage limit. It is, therefore, recommended to monitor the occupied disk space of the virtual machines and the available space in the ESXi host to avoid "oversubscription".

How to...

To be able to monitor your ESXi devices, you need to add them as Managed devices to your account.

You can have one of your fully Managed Network Node devices scan the network for you to discover ESXi devices. The Network Node device will check for devices listening on port 902 and if a device responds, it will be listed as an ESXi device in the discovered devices list. For further information on device discovery, refer to Network discovery.

You can also add your ESXi devices as Managed devices manually by following these steps:

Choose this option if you have ESXi credentials stored at the account or site level. The Site ESXi Credentials will be used in addition to the ESXi credentials specified in Account Settings unless this option is disabled in Site Settings. For information on how to store the ESXi credentials for the entire account or at the site level, refer to the ESXi Credentials section in Account Settings and Site Settings.

Click Save. Your ESXi device is now added as a Managed device to your account.